The infotainment market is a big opportunity for Nvidia Tegra. The company is getting a lot of high-profile design wins and most notable are among them are Audi, VW and BMW - select models have Nvidia Tegra infotainment systems inside.

Back in October 2014, Nvidia announced that some Honda cars will get Tegra based infotainment systems. Honda promised that the Honda Connect will end up inside the 2015 Honda Civic, Civic Tourer and the CR-V SUV, and first of them are just starting to ship.

As long as you live in Austria or Germany you can get Honda Connect, based on an Android 4.0.4 embedded operating system, for additional €600 to €605 depending on the country. This is close to four times less than Honda HDD Navigation, that was available between 2012 in 2014 in the Honda Civic, Civic Tourer and the CR-V SUV. HDD Navigation system is currently selling for €2251 in Austria and is very limited compared to the new Connect system.

Honda Connect features a 7-inch touchscreen powered by an unspecified Tegra processor and unofficial sources tell us it is an automotive Tegra 3-based chip inside.

Honda Connect offers a Garmin Navigation system, CD player that can play MP3s, AM/FM/DAB+ as well as Internet radio, app integration and Internet browser. The card has a modem as well, but we could not find out if it is based on 3G or 4G technology. Honda Connect also offers access to the Honda App center so you can install some additional applications. We are sure that AnTuTu won't be able to install on this Android 4.0.4 based system, but it should work just fine with your navigation, music, phone and internet browser. Spotify would be nice to have to there is no word on any additional application support.

The user interface, music player, and navigation do look nice, but we would like to see it first-hand before we can give you some additional details. Honda offers a reverse camera as part of this infotainment system as well, but we wanted to mention Honda Connect as this is one of the first reasonably priced infotainment systems that we saw inside a car.

We found a video of a demo unit in action recorded at an event in Spain, and you can see the system in action. It works really. We were surprised to see a laggy version of phone mirroring avaiable but working.

This time last year Nvidia’s Tegra gamble seemed to be paying off nicely, but the insanely competitive SoC market moves fast and all it takes for things to go badly wrong is one botched generation. The Tegra 4 was late to the party and Nvidia eventually ended up with a big and relatively powerful chip that nobody wanted.

In its latest earnings call Nvidia made it clear that revenues from Tegra are expected to decline $200 to $300 million this year from about $750 million last year. Even this seems like a relatively optimistic forecast. Tegra 3 ended up in quite a few high-volume products, such as the Nexus 7, HTC One X, LG Optimus X4 and a bunch of other phones and tablets. On paper, Tegra 4 will end up with a similar number of design wins, maybe even more, but nearly all of them are low-volume products.

At the moment there are only a handful of Tegra 4 products out there. These include HP’s Slatebook 10, Toshiba eXcite Pro and eXcite Write tablets and Nvidia’s own Shield console. Nvidia’s 7-inch Tegra Tab is also on the way, along with the Surface RT 2. Some Chinese vendors like ZTE are also expected to roll out a Tegra 4 phone here and there, but the chip won’t end up in any big brand phones.

Nvidia does not release any Tegra unit shipment info, so we can only guess how many Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 chips are out there, but it doesn’t take much to realise Tegra 4 is a flop. Shipments of the original Nexus 7, powered by the Tegra 3, are estimated just north of six million units. Surface RT shipments were abysmal. Earlier this year analysts put the figure at just 900,000 units after a full quarter of sales. Microsoft eventually took a massive write-down on its Surface RT stock. LG and HTC didn’t reveal any shipment figures for the Optimus 4X and HTC One X, either. HTC shipped about 40 million phones last year, while LG managed about 27 million. We can’t even begin to estimate how many of them were flagship products powered by Tegra, but the number was clearly in the millions.

This time around Nvidia can’t count on strong smartphone sales, let alone the Nexus 7 and Surface RT. Even if it scores high-end tablet design wins, the truth is that high-end Android tablets just aren’t selling well. Nvidia needed high-volume design wins and Android tablets just won’t do the trick. Qualcomm is in the new Nexus 7 and the HTC One. Back in May analysts reported that HTC One sales hit the 5 million mark in the first two months of sales, although shipments have slowed down since then. Millions of Snapdragons found a home in the HTC One and millions more will end up in the new Nexus 7.

Nvidia’s talk of a $200 to $300 million hit this year doesn’t exactly paint the full picture. Tegra 3 shipments in the first two quarters of 2013 were modest, but relatively good. However, nothing took its place and the true extent of the Tegra 4 flop will only become visible in the first quarter of 2014 and beyond. The big hope is that the Tegra 4i and Tegra 5 will start to come online by then, so the numbers for the full year won’t be as terrible, but it is abundantly clear that Nvidia cannot afford another Tegra 4.

As for Nvidia’s Tegra Tab and Shield, they might do well. Nvidia knows a thing or two about hardware, but even if they prove successful, they just won’t be enough, at least not in this cycle.

Although it was rather unfortunately launched with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, LG's Optimus 4X HD is finally getting some Android love in the form of the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update.

One of the first quad-core smartphones based on Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset certainly has enough power to cope with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and will surely benefit from features like Project Butter and others. We already did a review of the LG Optimus 4X HD and you can check it out here.

The new update is rolling out over OTA and via LG update tool, but currently only most of the European countries got it, but we guess that the rest of the world should follow as well. It's worth noting that a fully unlocked Optimus 4X HD can be picked up for roughly €300, which sounds like a pretty good deal.

In addition to GPU and Tegra roadmap updates Nvidia also showed and detailed its newest Kayla developer platform for CUDA on ARM, which should get developers ready for Logan SoCs scheduled for next year.

Built on a mini-ITX-like motherboard, the Kayla developement platform is based on a Tegra 3 CPU and connected via PCI-Express to a yet to be detailed dedicated GPU based on the Kepler design. The GPU has 2 SMXs for a total of 384 CUDA cores, according to a post over at PCGameshardware. The developer platform is solely made in order to give developers something to work with in case they want to see how well CUDA works on ARM, since Logan, with a Kepler-based GPU, will be the first CUDA-capable ARM SoC.

The Tegra 3 CPU part, paired up with 2GB of RAM, was most likely picked due to its PCI-Exprsss bus capability and should not reflect the actual performance of the Logan SoC, both performance and power consumption wise, considering the fact that the current Kalya board sucks around 10W. The "unnamed" GPU, paired up with 1GB of its own RAM, will be available in both MXM and PCI-Express form depedning on developers choice. It will bring all those neat CUDA features including OpenGL 4.3 features like tesselation, geometry shaders and compute shaders, all to be available on Logan as well since it is also based on the Kepler GPU.

The Kayla developer platform is certainly different from what we will see with Logan, at least on the specification and performance level, but should offer similar feature list, at least when CUDA is concerned.

Nvidia did not shed any light on specific details of Kayla, as it keeps all the juicy details for developers interested in it. It should be available in next few months and it would be quite interesting to see what some developers can do with it as it will certainly be a good indication on what to expect in Logan parts.

Thanks to the fact that Nvidia is currently quite keen on giving superhero names to its Tegra related products and Jen-Hsun note that Kayla is "Logan's girlfried" it was just a matter of time before it can be pin-pointed to Kayla Silverfox that appeared in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the original X-Men Animated Series.

Asus has now officially announced its tablet/All-in-One hybrid that will be known as the Asus Transformer AiO. The new Transformer AiO features a 18.4-inch tablet based on Nvidia Tegra 3 and Android 4.1 OS and paired up with a Intel Ivy Bridge based dock that turns it into a decent Windows 8 All-in-One.

As noted, the tablet, and AiO when the tablet is docked, features an 18.4-inch 1920x1080 LED-backlit IPS touchscreen with 10-point multi-touch. The dock part of the AiO will feature 3rd generation Intel Core i7-3770, Core i5-3350P or Core i3-3220 CPU depending on the SKU, Geforce GT 730M 2GB graphics card, up to 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM and up to 2TB of SATA HDD storage. It also apparently has its own 802.11abgn dual-band WiFi, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 4.0, four USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 port, HDMI output, memory card reader, and an optional DVB-T, Hybrid DVB-T or Hybrid DTMB tuner.

The tablet part on the other hand is based on Nvidia's venerable Tegra 3 chip, has 2GB of DDR3 memory and 32GB of on-board storage. It also comes with 802.11abgn dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0+EDR, one mini-USB 2.0 port, an microSD card slot and 1MP front facing camera. The battery in the tablet a 38W Li-ion battery rated for up to 5 hours of use. Just in case you are wondering, the tablet has 294 x 466 x 18mm dimensions and weighs a hefty 2.4kg.

According to Asus, the new Asus Transformer AiO is scheduled to be available in selected markets from Q1 2013, but it has been already revealed that the USA can expect in on retail/e-tail shelves this Spring with a US $1,299 price tag.

Gainward has been a loyal Nvidia partner for year and it is now taking the relationship to a new level. No, it is not moving into Nvidia’s HQ, but it is entering the tablet market with an affordable Tegra tablet.

The Gainward Galapad 7 is a low cost 7-inch tablet powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 3 clocked at 1.3GHz. The screen resolution is 1024x600, which is still the norm in the 7-inch world, but it’s a notch under the Nexus 7. At least it is an IPS screen, which is not always the case in this price range.

The Galapad 7 has 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage and a microSD slot. A micro-HDMI output is also on board, along with USB 2.0, GPS and Bluetooth 3.0. It has a 3500mAh Li-polymer battery, which makes in relatively light. It weighs 330g and measures 196x122x9.9mm.

Gainward’s first tablet is already on sale in Europe and prices start at €179. It is a bit pricier than the Asus MeMo Pad ME172V, Acer’s Iconia Tab B1 and Lenovo’s Ideatab A2017A, but then again it is based on a much faster chip. It is also significantly cheaper than the Nexus 7, which usually sells for €230+ in Europe. All in all it sounds like a fair deal for a speedy Jelly Bean tablet.

Now here’s an interesting leak, just what the doctor ordered to spice up a rather slow news cycle. Chiphell has posted a slide containing a few Tegra 4 specs, but we still don't know the clocks or a few other interesting details. Of course, the leak should be taken with a grain of salt, but the specs are more or less in line with what we were expecting all along.

Tegra 4, codenamed Wayne, is a 28nm part with revamped graphics and new ARM cores. Although the slide does not directly point to the type of ARM cores used in the design, the new chip is based on ARM's latest A15 core. Like the Tegra 3, the new chip will also feature an additional companion core to improve energy efficiency. No surprises here really.

In terms of GPU performance, Nvidia promises to deliver a six-fold improvement over the Tegra 3 and a 20x improvement over Tegra 2 chips. Oddly enough, in spite of Nvidia’s graphics prowess, Tegra chips never featured world-beating graphics. This time around they could, thanks to the new 72-core GPU. The GPU will be able to cope with 2560x1600 screens at 120Hz, but it could also take on 4K resolutions, although details are still sketchy. At this point 4K support could only be relevant for next-generation smart TVs, with a huge price tag.

As far as other features go, Tegra 4 brings support for USB 3.0 and DDR3L dual-channel memory. The leak does not mention LTE support.

Tegra 4 will have to take on the likes of Samsung’s upcoming Exynos 5440, which should also debut in early 2013. Nvidia was first to market with a quad-core A9 chip, but this time around it will have to face off against the new Exynos and A15 quad-cores from other vendors.

Nvidia is expected to showcase the new chip at CES and we’ll be there to check it out.

Microsoft’s Surface RT is just barely out, while the Pro is still not available, but rumours of next generation Surface products are already starting to trickle in.

According to a leak fresh out of Redmond, the company might looking to Qualcomm for its next-gen Surface RT, while AMD’s Temash quad-core APU could replace Intel’s Core i5 chips in the Surface Pro.

It doesn’t end there. The next generation RT is said to feature a smaller 8.9-inch form factor, while the Pro could grow to 11.6 inches, just to differentiate them a bit more. It sounds plausible, but there is talk of an even larger device in the works, a 14.6-inch Surface Book, a hybrid ultrabook with a proper keyboard and trackpad.

Needless to say, these early leaks should be taken with a grain of salt, although at least some of them sound plausible and frankly we would like to see AMD score a significant design win for Tamesh. It would spice things up a bit.

The main specs include a 7-inch 1024x600 screen powered by Nvidia's 1.2GHz clocked Tegra 3 chip and 1GB of memory. It has 8GB of internal flash storage expandable by a microSD card slot. The rest of the specs include 802.11bgn WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, micro USB and micro HDMI ports, 2MP front camera, a battery capable of keeping it alive for up to 7.5 hours and, of course, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS.

Unfortunately, Acer priced it at US $229.99 which puts it in an awkward position between the 8 and 16GB Nexus 7 tablets, but as noted, some might be convinced with a microSD card slot and a micro HDMI output.